Anybody else using it and what tasks did you use it for? Does the quality meet your standards? Other thoughts about it? Seems economical if the results aren't crap. Dan Kennedy wrote about his experience earlier this year.

At the urging of Panos Ipeirotis, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, we began experimenting with mTurk last spring to clean, de-duplicate and reformat data. We've since used the tool to collect or proof more than 28,000 data points, from the names of companies that received stimulus money to the categorization of answers to our home loan modification questionnaire. We're impressed with the speed and accuracy of its results. For example, a project we estimated would take a full-time staffer almost three days to finish was completed on mTurk overnight for $37, with 99 percent accuracy.

Mechanical Turk has proven to be more than a shortcut. It has freed up staff time for more complicated work. We've also used it to retrieve data from government databases that prohibit scraping.

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